What’s the best way to attach a walk cycle to a motion path so as to get the timing right? Say I have an 8-frame walk cycle where my character walks in place. Now I want to attach the cycle to a motion path so that my character appears to walk across the screen. When I did this, my character was walking so fast that you could hardly see the motion. I needed to slow down his progress across the screen so that it matched his leg motions better. But how? By adding more copies of the walk cycle to my element?
Also, how can I shorten my motion path after it’s created? Or even delete it and start over? When I tried to shorten the path, many cells in my element were deleted. There are obviously many details I’m not understanding!
hi,
first of all, you must be aware of how long your animation cycle would last. if your animation is a 24 fps (frames per second, to be set in the main menu > file > animation properties), then the whole 8-frame walk cycle would last a third of a second.
secondly, it’s much work to animate things on 1s (each frame a new image), because you have to catch and visualize every tiny fraction of the movement sequence.
if your images show phases not so close to one another then it’s better to animate on 2s or even 3s (two or three same frames in a row). in order to achieve this, select the appropriate frame in the exposure sheet and key ctrl-2 or ctrl-3. this will extend the frame.
to visualize now: given the animation frame rate at 24 fps, the 8-frame cycle on 3s would be one second of a movement.
after you design your frames, you can attach them to a peg. when you have to manipulate the frames number after you attached them to a peg, then it’s sometimes less work to drop the peg and create the new one.
in the v3.5 version you have the element animation without using pegs. if it’s your software version, please check the demo video how to use this new feature:
http://www.toonboom.com/products/toonBoomStudio/features.php,
‘animating elements’.
cheers,
rob
I believe you will gain much insight from reading this thread which covers your question and a lot more. After reading it completely if you have additional questions please ask them here and we will try to help. -JK
Cut Outs and the Walk Cycle